Aspects of the present invention relate in general to distributed computing system security, and more particularly to, methods and systems providing trusted and secure access to virtual machine images dispatched to a distributed computing system.
A distributed computing system is a group of autonomous computing systems connected to each other through a network. In such a system, the processing resources of the constituent computing systems may be dynamically scalable and often virtualized. A virtual resource is a piece of software designed to emulate a piece of hardware. The use of virtual resources may increase the efficiency of a distributed computing system, since details relating to the implementation of software applications running on the system and the hardware that supports them may be delegated among the computing systems in the distributed computing system and abstracted to the end user.
In some cases, a virtual machine image may be dispatched to a distributed computing system by a management appliance. Secure access to the dispatched virtual machine from a management appliance generally involves standard security features such as login identification and passwords. It may often become a tedious and time consuming task to manage security for the dispatched virtual machine image. The complexity of such a task is based in part on the movement of the virtual machine across multiple physical machines. Security measures based on the physical location of the virtual machine may become more complicated as they adapt to the characteristics of a virtual machine image dispatched onto a distributed computing system.